After she dropped off Taylor, one more fruitless interview convinced Kate that further contact with the men on Dory Quillin’s list could wait; perhaps an interval of a day or two might introduce an element of apprehension and lead to useful inconsistencies in their stories.
Pulling the Plymouth onto the Hollywood Freeway, she admitted that there was no real justification for returning to West Hollywood—only a nagging sense of having unfinished business there. Perhaps a need to see in broad daylight the house and neighborhood where Dory Quillin had grown up and then had run away from when she was only fourteen. Or perhaps to confirm by the light of day two parents who had obliterated from their lives a daughter’s existence, unrelenting even in the face of her death.
As she crossed La Brea Avenue into West Hollywood, Kate slowed the Plymouth as much as traffic would allow. With late afternoon yellow sunlight washing the city, she cruised along Santa Monica Boulevard, happy to be without Taylor beside her, happy to look at the clothing shops and restaurants and sidewalk cafés and all the street activity, euphoric as a child on a summer vacation. She knew that the source of her pleasure was sheer geographic location: the symbolism of this city, a city where she was welcome, a place where she belonged.
* * *
Roland Quillin was in his yard kneeling in the flower bed lining the edge of the house, working a short-handled hoe at the base of a rosebush, turning the soil into soft loam. Watching his diligence, Kate walked across the lawn.
As if he felt the vibration of her footsteps, his rhythmic hoeing slowed; he looked around at her and soberly nodded. With a tense, resentful sqauring of his shoulders he resumed his labor.
“Sorry to disturb you,” she said to his back, not minding the discourtesy. “Is Mrs. Quillin at home?”
He squatted on his heels, earthen stains on the knees of his gray cotton pants, and wiped a shirt sleeve across his forehead; the curved scar on his cheekbone looked pinkish white in the sun. “She’s resting, she had cancer surgery a few months ago. She’s tired today, I’d just as soon not disturb her.”
“Of course,” Kate said with immediate sympathy, reminded again that many people’s lives contained no less grief than her own. “I hope she’s recovering without too many problems.”
“Well, it was cervical, they think they got it all. She saw the doctor again this morning, it always takes a lot out of her.” He knelt again and continued his hoeing. “No offense, I hope the police won’t have to bother us anymore. We don’t know anything about what’s happened to Dolores. She’s alone with God now, enduring His judgment.”
Broodingly, Kate watched Roland Quillin scoop and shape dirt around the rosebushes, dark hair matted along his thick arms, dirt-stained gloves protecting his hands. Obviously, neither a night’s sleep nor this reproachfully bright new June day had brought any fresh perspective to the Quillins.
“I have only a few questions,” she finally said. “Do you know the name of the black woman your daughter brought here and how we might reach her?”
The hoeing did not stop. “No idea whatsoever, me nor Flora either. Dolores must have told us but we put it right out of our minds.”
“Do you have any idea why your daughter would take a trip up into Central California a few days before she was killed?”
The hoe stilled, then resumed its activity, stabbing at the soil. “No idea at all,” Roland Quillin said.
There’s something here, Kate decided. With deliberate slowness she pulled her notebook out of her shoulder bag. Roland Quillin stopped hoeing and again sat back on his haunches as she made a note of her exact question and his reply.
He stood, removed his gardening gloves, stuffed them into a back pocket. “If you have more questions, let’s go inside,” he said curtly. “This isn’t any of the neighbors’ business.”
“I have no more questions right now,” Kate said. “I hope Mrs. Quillin feels better soon.” She added evenly, “I’ll be back in touch.”
* * *
Kate parked on La Brea. The street was quiet, shadowy, its businesses shuttered for the night. She walked up the dimly lit hill toward the Nightwood Bar, noticing that at ten o’clock the drapes on all the windows in the Casbah Motel were drawn; either the guests were early risers, or, more likely, there were few guests.
By contrast the interior of the Nightwood Bar seemed exceedingly bright. From the entryway she glimpsed Andrea Ross sitting alone at a small table reading a magazine. Kate pulled her attention quickly away to assess the room, nodding to Maggie Schaeffer who leaned against the cash register, arms crossed, gazing at Kate; she was clad in beige pants and a long-sleeved lavender shirt with a pale lavender armband.
There were perhaps fifteen women present, seemingly a good crowd for a Monday night, but the place felt oddly quiet. On the bar television set, its volume set so low that she could hear only a low buzz of dialogue, Chris Cagney argued vehemently with a stolid Mary Beth Lacey. From the pool table there was a click and clash of balls; a woman in faded jeans with frayed back pockets briefly inspected her handiwork then leaned over to sight her next shot, her sweatsuit-clad opponent looking on, pool cue held on her shoulder like a rifle.
At the bar, their backs to her, Patton sat with Roz; next to Patton were the two black women Kate had interviewed yesterday, Raney and Audie. At a table, Kendall sat between Ash and Tora, all three with chins in hand, their gazes focused on a Scrabble board. All the women in the bar wore identical armbands; Kate noticed a basket of lavender bands on the end of the bar next to the glass bowl filled with coins to benefit the fight against AIDS.
Patton swiveled on her stool. Staring at Kate she pushed back her yacht cap, then nudged Roz, said something to Raney. One by one the women at the bar turned to look at Kate.
In no hurry to advance into the quiet room, Kate moved over to the jukebox and saw that it was dark—one reason for the abnormal silence, and another symbol of the respect accorded to Dory Quillin by Maggie Schaeffer and the women in this bar. Kate glanced at a few of the music selections: “You Needed Me,” “Just One Look,” “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” “More Than A Woman”—Anne Murray, Linda Ronstadt, Elton John, the Bee Gees…Old stuff, middle of the road pop rock, the kind she had grown to love because it was Anne’s music… She gripped the sides of the jukebox, angry that these unexpected, pitiless strikes of memory were still so debilitating, that she still could not deal with this kind of pain.
Straightening her shoulders, she walked purposefully to the bar.
Patton was still staring at her, her light blue eyes cool and mocking. “So,” she said around the cigarette dangling from a corner of her mouth, “how’s the murder business?”
Apparently Patton’s perspective, like the Quillins’, had not changed overnight. Kate replied expressionlessly, “We never have a slow day.”
Raney chuckled, a low rich sound. The cigaretteless corner of Patton’s mouth turned up; she continued to stare at Kate.
“It’s nice to see you again,” Maggie Schaeffer said in firm tones to Kate. “Can the house buy you a drink?”
“No, but thanks.” Kate smiled, appreciating her warmth. “One of these days I’ll come in here off-duty.”
Patton snorted.
“I hope so,” Maggie responded. “You’ll be very welcome.”
Kate raised her voice only slightly to be heard throughout the quiet bar. “I have information that Dory Quillin had a lover who was with her for a while.” She stood with her body placed carefully, her back toward Andrea Ross, to be certain that inadvertent eye contact would not reveal Andrea as the source of this information.
Kate continued, “The woman is black—”
“That really narrows it down,” Raney said.
The room erupted in laughter. Grinning at Raney, Kate finished, “—and her first name is Neely.”
Silence returned to the bar; even the click of the pool balls had ceased. Kate waited with very little hope. Undoubtedly there had been considerable conversation among all these women, and if they were not hostile toward this investigation, surely they were fearful. The homicide of a lesbian who was linked with drugs and prostitution was a morass few people would willingly entangle themselves in, much less women with their own individual anxieties about exposure.
“We need to talk to her,” Kate explained. “We need to learn more about the victim—”
“Victim,” Patton repeated bitterly. “Why don’t you call Dory by a number?”
“Patton, stuff it up your knapsack,” Maggie growled. She said to Kate, “You might check out the other bars around town. Peanuts, the Palms—”
“Not Peanuts,” Audie said, “it’s a place for teenyboppers, it’s—” Meeting Patton’s glare, she choked off into silence.
Definitely Peanuts, Kate decided. If Dory Quillin was any indication, the woman named Neely had a taste for very young women. “Thanks,” she said to Maggie. She raised her voice. “Does anyone know Neely’s last name?”
Again there was silence.
Tired and disappointed, conceding defeat, Kate sought the eye of Andrea Ross to nod goodnight. But Andrea gestured to her.
Feeling the eyes of the entire bar on her, Kate walked to Andrea’s table and said in a low tone, “I don’t want to give you a problem here.”
Andrea smiled. “Sit down, Typhoid Mary.”
Kate pulled out a chair. “However this case turns out, I’ll be glad when it’s over,” she muttered. Then she looked at Andrea in pleasure.
Her dark hair, pulled into an artfully twisted pile behind her head, conveyed the same effect as the tight-fitting cap she had worn last night: it unobtrusively framed her regal face. She wore an oversize shirt a vivid shade of coral, its shapelessness tantalizing with its suggestion of the ripeness of her body. Kate looked down at Andrea’s fingers, which were tracing the rim of her glass, thinking that never in her life had a woman made so instantaneous and stirring a physical impact on her, not even Anne.
She cleared her throat. “These two bars that Maggie mentioned, are they near here?”
Andrea nodded. “I can do even better. Neely could be at one of them tonight—and since I know what she looks like, I thought you might like me to come with you.”
“I’d be grateful,” Kate said quietly, feeling the heavy pulse beat in her throat.
Maggie approached the table with a tray. “You can always use some coffee,” she said gruffly, serving Kate and placing a cocktail napkin next to, not under, the coffee mug.
“Maggie, I really appreciate it,” Kate said. She picked up her mug and sipped from it, palming the napkin with her other hand. She glanced at the napkin, slid it into her jacket pocket. On the underside was written MALONE.
Andrea looked at her with bright eyes, obviously having missed nothing. She smiled. “Ready to go, Detective Delafield?”
* * *
During this second trip of the day into West Hollywood Kate was distracted from the landscape by the presence of the woman beside her, by the sensual fragrance of musk filling her nostrils.
“I haven’t been here in such a long time,” Andrea said softly, looking around her with interest. “Except for going to the Nightwood Bar, I don’t get out of my own territory much.”
“Nor me,” Kate replied. Hoping to elicit more personal information from Andrea she offered, “It seems I divide all my time between home in Santa Monica and working at Wilshire Division.”
“It’s the Silverlake district and Echo Park for me,” Andrea responded.
Kate searched for other conversation, innocuous topics that would not be construed as a ferreting out of information by an LAPD detective. She had not felt this awkward since her early teens. “The music on the jukebox back there,” she said, “I haven’t heard some of those songs in years.”
“Neither had I,” Andrea said, her low voice distant, melancholy. “Is there anything that can hurt more than music? Just the line of a song—and a whole period of your life comes flooding back… All those memories, all that emotion…”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Kate said.
In the unbroken silence that followed, Kate understood that she had chosen the one topic guaranteed to fully shut off communication. She shared a common anguish with this woman, but neither of them wished to reveal her pain, much less explain it.
She made a U-turn around the median strip on Santa Monica Boulevard and found a parking space in front of the neon-lit massage parlor next to the Palms. The bar looked ordinary enough; then Kate opened her car door to rock music pouring from the doorway a good fifty feet away. As she approached the bar the beat seemed to bounce up from the pavement. She thought: I’m going to hate this place…
The entryway was festooned with signs, among them a boldly lettered warning that two pieces of ID were required, including one with a photo. Deafened by the blasting music, Kate followed Andrea into a long, narrow room, dim and cool, acrid with the smell of beer and smoke.
A dozen or so patrons, as many men as women, were scattered along the bar or at tables against the wall. There were two bartenders; Kate felt their eyes on her as she followed Andrea through this room and into another in the back which reverberated with sound, its dance floor lit with stage lights, the walls lined with neon that flashed to the thundering beat as a male singer shrieked, I love rock-’n-roll music! At the side of the room a disc jockey sat in a glass-enclosed cage gazing out with glassy-eyed boredom. Two couples were at tables, one of the couples male. On the dance floor two young women spun, twisted, bobbed and dipped in unison. Kate’s ears buzzed; she could feel vibration in the floor, moving up her legs and through her body.
Andrea shook her head, turned and headed back toward the outer room. Pausing at the doorway, a hand on Kate’s arm, her lips close to Kate’s ear to be heard, she said, “Why don’t you write a note, leave it with the bartender?”
Kate took out one of her cards. Leaning on a shelf which was designed to hold drinks beside several high-backed stools, she wrote: TO NEELY MALONE. CALL ME. I’M TRYING TO HELP.
As she capped her pen, Andrea picked up the card.
“I’ll take care of it,” Kate shouted over the din.
Again Andrea’s lips were close to her ear: “It’s best to let me. You act too much like a cop.”
Andrea sauntered over to the bar, to the service area. When one of the bartenders came over Andrea beckoned her closer and spoke to her, sliding the card into the bartender’s shirt pocket, Kate could see a bill wrapped around the card. Then, without looking at Kate, Andrea walked to the entrance; Kate followed.
She opened the car door for Andrea. “Thanks. How much do I owe you?”
“Five. I thought she’d be more inclined to watch out for Neely. Why don’t you make out another card for Peanuts? If Neely’s not there I’ll do my same act. You can wait in the car.”
Extracting two five-dollar bills from her wallet, Kate smiled and shook her head, still recovering from the shock waves of the music. “Have times really changed this much? I’ve never felt so damn old in all my life.”
Andrea chuckled. “You should be here on weekends. A cover charge, two-drink minimum—and it’s packed to the rafters with lesbians who look like they’re fourteen years old.”
Again Kate shook her head.
She drove back to the Nightwood Bar talking easily in answer to Andrea’s questions about her background—about growing up in Michigan, her parents, her stint in military service and the stretch in Vietnam, her career at LAPD.
In the parking lot of the Nightwood Bar, as Andrea opened her car door, Kate boldly turned to her to ask if she might call; but Andrea reached to her, silencing her with cool soft fingers that seemed to burn the side of Kate’s neck with their gentleness.
“I’ll be seeing you soon,” Andrea said. And she was gone.